Article by J. Patrick Boyer

Just as Muskoka’s early settlement era saw individuals and families launch Bala, Windermere, Port Sydney and Minett, Boyce Henry Cunnington founded a community on Lake of Bays. Yet while those other locales drew enough settlers to become villages, Port Cunnington remained more a Franklin Township place.

Franklin is at the edge of Muskoka, its eastern boundary abutting Haliburton County. Not opened to homesteaders until 1877, settlement of the area was slow. Development was further delayed by limited access along the rugged north-south Bobcaygeon colonization road, until east-west roads from Huntsville made getting to Franklin easier, as did the 1886 canal between Fairy and Peninsula lakes. So 23-year-old pioneer B.H. Cunnington displayed a sense of adventure and powers of endurance by arriving in 1877 and overwintering in a sod hut he dug into the ground. 

His grandson Doug Cunnington has ensured B.H.’s place in Muskoka history by researching and writing the saga of Port Cunnington. Before describing how the community’s undisputed founder felled trees to make a homestead, he drew a family tree – as essential as a map of the township because “the history begins by following the Cunnington family through the generations associated with operation of Port Cunnington Lodge.” With no fewer than four contemporaries named Boyce Henry Cunnington, Doug distinguishes his grandfather by only using his initials B.H.

The young man emerging from the ground in the spring of 1878 built a log cabin about a mile inland from the lake. Self-sufficient since infancy, B.H. had been six months old when his father, a London draper, died of tuberculosis. His mother Emily found bookkeeping work and paid a nurse to raise him to age seven when he entered his grandmother’s private school for “education and discipline,” advancing next to a working school training orphans, which he left at 14. After a restless apprenticeship to a draper, he crossed an Atlantic Ocean so rough he vowed to never sail back. Working for an Ontario farmer at Mayfield, he met Prudence Gray. Hearing about free land in Muskoka, he headed north to create a home where she might join him.

On January 8, 1878 B.H. was granted 189 acres in Franklin, partly fronting on Lake of Bays. “He cleared and tilled the land using oxen,” recounts grandson Doug, the numerous stone fences evincing “the hard work and disappointment that must have been his when clearing this land.” In navigation season, B.H. rowed 13 miles down the often rough lake to Baysville and back for mail and supplies. In 1882 he travelled further south, married Prudence and brought her to their Muskoka homestead.

Joining the newlyweds that same year, his mother Emily journeyed from England to Toronto, up to Bracebridge, out to Baysville, boarding the Dean for the steamer’s first operating season, reaching the peninsula and walking a mile through bush to the homestead. Londoner “Granny” would help raise many grandchildren, “thriving on pioneer life” amidst bears and “quickly adapting to the customs of settlers’ life.”

By 1886, those customs included catering to vacationers so B.H. and Prudence acquired more lakefront property (eventually totaling 640 acres) for their home where visitors paid them for accommodation and meals. Opening in 1890 with three guests, by the early 20th century the summer resort could accommodate 60, with plenty of Cunningtons to perform the countless hotelier tasks. One guest, Italian opera singer Madame Maroni, dubbed the place “Port Cunnington” because of all the family members present, a happy jest that stuck.

Port Cunnington contributed to Muskoka’s record of the most “summer post offices” in all Canada when, on July 6, 1914, Winnifred Campbell became postmistress. Though never incorporated as a village, the locale calls out for recognition as a long-standing player in Muskoka’s summer life and its ability to raise a hockey team for intervillage winter play.